Members of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition are busy publishing, researching, teaching, designing, leading, and mentoring. And in the process we’re shaping the future of our field.  In this blog post series, let’s celebrate Coalition Feminists Getting Sh*t Done! As the series continues, we will celebrate the accomplishments of different groups of members within the CFSHRC. To get things started, this post features recent publications, ongoing research and pedagogical projects by members of the Advisory Board, including several Executive Board members. Let’s take the time to read their work, connect with possible mentors and collaborators, and celebrate their accomplishments!

Check out this quick list of their research projects. For more detail, feel free to reach out to these Advisory Board members through their web profiles included below.

Publications and Research

Lynée Lewis Gaillet is the coeditor of the recently published book Landmark Essays on Archival Research  (Eds. Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Diana Eidson, and Donald Gammill).

Review the important essays included in this collection here. The Landmark Essays Series, edited by James J. Murphy and Coalition feminist member Krista Ratcliffe, with contributions by several other Coalition scholars, including Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford. And congrats to all of the authors included in the collection.

Charlotte Hogg published “Including Conservative Women’s Rhetorics in an ‘Ethics of Hope and Care” in Rhetoric Review 34.4.

Download the article here.

In May, after 10 years of hard, if off-again, on-again labor, Jenn Fishman, Joan Mullin, and Glenn Blalock, launched REx: The Research Exchange Index and published REx 1, which is a searchable database of peer-reviewed information about writing research conducted between 2000 and the present. As Jenn writes: “Distinct from scholarship about writing research, which tends to feature completed studies and be written by a limit set of researchers, REx was designed to capture (in brief form) information about everyone’s research activity, whether it’s ongoing, completed or stalled. There’s so much we can learn from each other, and this project represents an attempt to facilitate that. Anyone interested in getting involved or contributing to REx 2 should be in touch with Joan. She and her colleagues at UNC-Charlotte are leading the next charge.”

Explore this important resource here.

Mariana Grohowski co-authored the chapter “Subverting Virtual Hierarchies: A Cyberfeminist Critique of Course-Management Spaces” in the digital book Making Space, edited by James P. Purdy and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss.

Check out this chapter and the rest of this engaging e-book here.

Pamela VanHaitsma, with support from a 2016 Summer Research Fellowship from the Office of Research, and the 2015-2016 Robin L. Hixon Fellowship from the Department of English, both at Old Dominion University, is conducting archival research for a new project on the rhetorical practices of 19th-century women teachers in romantic friendships. Contact Dr. VanHaitsma to learn more about her ongoing research and read her recent publication “Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography” in Rhetoric Review 35.2.

Read the article here.

Tarez Samra Graban published Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories with SIUP in July 2015.  Tarez is now serving as a non-residential research fellow through the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa, until 2018, and has begun a new project at the intersection of rhetoric, archives, and transnational feminism.  

Learn more about her research or reach out to Tarez through her online portfolio http://tsgfolio.com

Awards and Grants

Cristina Devereaux Ramirez‘s monograph Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942 (UAP, 2015) was awarded the 2016 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award.

Get your copy here!

Risa Applegarth’s book, Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science, received the CCCC 2016 Outstanding Book Award this year.

Read a book review in RSQ.

Jenn Fishman, Jane Greer, and  Dominic DelliCarpini were awarded a CCCC Research Initiative Grant for their work on the Undergraduate Research Impact. 

Contact Jenn for updates on this important collaborative research.

Teaching

Pamela VanHaitsma is designing a graduate seminar in Women’s & Feminist Rhetorics for this fall. Check out her course website https://feministrhetoricsblog.wordpress.com/.

In Spring 2017, Tarez Samra Graban will be conducting an undergraduate seminar called “Women in the Archives, Vandals in the Stacks,” where students will study and work at the intersections of feminist rhetoric, archival theory, and institutional history. In partnership with FSU’s Director of Special Collections, Graban will have students process and identify archival materials related to some of FSU’s former women faculty members.

The this list is just a small selection of what our advisory board has been doing. We hope to continue sharing and celebrating the work of coalition members more regularly on this blog. What are you working on? Let us know in the comments section or contact Trish Fancher (fancher.patricia at gmail dot com) to be included in the future blog posts.

Hello and thank you for your attention. Now that I have it, I’d like to make two brief introductions.

Introduction 1: My name is Mariana Grohowski. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University Southeast. I was recently appointed to the Coalition’s Advisory Board and I have been a proud member of the Coalition since 2013. In 2014, I helped to assess the Coalition’s use of social and digital media.

Introduction 2: The second and more important introduction I seek to facilitate is to introduce the Coalition to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Veterans Studies (JVS).  I founded JVS in November 2015 after 3 years of receiving journal article rejections based on the focus of my research on women veterans. Indeed, I noticed a lack of referred publication venues for interdisciplinary research and writing on and about the issues and experiences of military veterans. JVS is the only refereed, open access, interdisciplinary, online journal focused on veterans studies.

I published the inaugural issue, thanks to the help of generous reviewers and an amazing editorial board, in July 2016. I hope many members of the Coalition will find the articles to be of interest. The inaugural issue contains eight original research articles and three reviews: two of books and one on a work of new media). The entire issue is available online (open access) at veteransstudies.org/journal

Because I suspect that the Coalition may be unfamiliar with the term “veterans studies,” please allow me to briefly explain my use of the term. We might think of veterans studies, Coalition, comparable to our interest in gender studies. Whereas feminists identify the ways in which gender shapes intellectual and social norms, including its intersections with power structures (i.e., race, class, and sexuality), veterans studies scholars are interested in studying how society views and treats “the veteran” as well as how “the veteran” views him/herself.

In short, veterans studies is an multi-faceted, scholarly investigation of military veterans and their families. Topics oftentimes include, but are not limited to: combat exposure, reintegration challenges, and the complex systems that shape the veteran experience. Veterans studies, by its very nature, may analyze experiences closely tied to military studies, but the emphasis of veterans studies is the “veteran experience,” i.e., what happens after the service member departs the armed forces. Scholars of veterans studies pursue their work in such fields as Rhetoric and Composition, Literature, History, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Student Affairs (among others). Likewise, the work of veterans studies occurs in and outside of formal education–by current members of the military, leaders of nonprofits, independent artists, grassroots activists, and students taking courses in veterans studies–indeed, “veterans studies” designated programs have been established at four public universities in the U.S.

Questions that drive veterans studies scholars and are the sorts that the Journal of Veterans Studies seeks to promote may include:

1.  Who is “the veteran in society?”
2. How do power structures like race, class, gender, and sexuality affect the veteran from claiming his/her “veteran-ness”?
3. Who “counts” as a veteran?

Three articles in the inaugural issue Coalitionists may find most interesting are summarized briefly:

(1) “A Theoretical and Applied Review of Embodied Restorying for Post-Deployment Family Reintegration” by Jeanne Flora, David M. Boje, Grace Ann Rosile, and Kenneth Hacker (New Mexico State University).

This article shares the team’s innovative theoretical approach to working with veterans and their families through storytelling. According to the authors’ approach, storytelling is utilized to reframe and recreate narratives held by veterans and their family members. Compellingly, the authors substantiate the importance of storytelling and the role family members play in the veteran’s process of reintegration post-deployment.

(2) Leland Spencer’s (Miami University) “Faculty Advising and Student Veterans: Adventures in Applying Research and Training By critically reflecting on his experiences academically advising undergraduate student veterans.”

In this article, Spencer engages personal narrative to share his journey of learning (by stumbling and tons of research) to effectively advise undergraduate student veterans. I think Coalition readers could view Spencer’s writing style as employing feminist strategies, as he is as quick to admit to what he doesn’t know as he is to providing answers. The author provides five suggestions that readers–who are teachers, administrators, and staff who work with student veterans in postsecondary educational settings–will find valuable.

(3) “The Other, Other Students: Understanding the Experiences of Graduate Student Veterans” by Glenn Allen Phillips (UT Arlington)

Phillips shares the experiences and perceptions of graduate students with military experience. Not only does he present long experts from his interviews with eleven graduate student veterans, but he also situates his findings within five key areas. As Phillips points out, his research is a first of its kind in its focus on the mechanisms of support (five of which he identifies from his interviews) advanced-degree seeking student veterans desperately need.

In closing, there are three ways all Coalitionists can work in #solidarity to promote and sustain JVS:

1. Spread the word about the journal your friends. Even those you think might be tangentially interested. Let them know the journal is live. Encourage your friends to subscribe and contribute. Share this convenient URL http://tiny.cc/jvs and “Like us on Facebook” (https://www.facebook.com/journalveteransstudies/)
2.  Consider submitting an article, announcement, book or media reviews, interviews, and program or organizational profiles to the journal for publication. JVS only succeed if people take time to send us their ideas. (Full submission guidelines are available at http://tiny.cc/jvssubmit). Coalitionists might be intrigued by the December 1, 2016 call for papers for a special issue in which former CCCC presenters are asked to contribute their (slightly) modified presentations (related to veterans studies).
3. Make the effort to cite articles published in the journal. As we know, Coalition, the power of citations makes an impact (i.e., to an author’s legitimacy and a journal’s credibility). Please consider: Is there a way you can integrate a source published in JVS in your article, review, presentation, etc.?

Thank you, Coalition, for your support of this scholarly endeavor. Please feel free contact me, Mariana Grohowski at mgrohow@gmail.com.

By Mariana Grohowski, CFSHRC Advisory Board Members